The supervisors said Mes had succeeded in turning around the company since he was first appointed to the post four years ago.

When he took over in 2012, Slovenske železnice recorded a net loss of EUR 15m, but Mes succeeded in making the company profitable again.

Last year, the company posted a net profit of EUR 21m posted. Apart from that, revenue grew by more than a fifth to last year's EUR 578m in this period.

In the same period, earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) jumped by 70% to over 72 million.

Financial obligations of the company stood at EUR 394m or at 60% of the company's assets at the end of 2011. But on 31 December last year, Slovenske železnice owed just over EUR 143m or a quarter of the assets.

Among other upbeat indices, the supervisors also said that the added value per employee grew from EUR 31,913 in 2011 to EUR 39,082 last year, while the number of employees went down by more than 12% to 7,741 in the period.

Moreover, Slovenske železnice have managed to bring up the girth of transported goods from 17.6 to 18.3 million tonnes since 2011. The number of passengers meanwhile dropped from 15.7 million to 14.2 million, which was due to the damage the 2014 ice storm caused to rail lines. In 2013 the number stood at 16.4 million.

Mes, one of the few to hold on to the post for an entire term and the only one to get a second term at the helm of Slovenske železnice since Slovenia's independence in 1991, noted for the STA in December that the company would focus on development after undergoing intensive damage control.